Patrick White

O, An Oasis In A Tarpit - Poem by Patrick White

O, an oasis in a tarpit when being alive is more than enough, and happiness doesn’t scare me half as much as it used to. It’s only an eyelid, an opening and closing of doors, a Cepheid variable, the blinking of the moon, blue chicory among the stinging nettles, not the horrific beatitude it used to seem when I was too young- -When was that? Yesterday? - -to let it come and go. A waterlily of joy, it blossoms among the starsbut its white fire is rooted in the lowest detritus of the swamp that lives on its own perishing.

Happiness isn’t a reason to live. It’s living beyond reason, unreasonably. Life without a buffer zonewhen you can walk skinless in the moonlightlike a smooth stone in a medicine-bag of starsthat sends you skipping out over their reflections in a lake without a name as deep as the mystery of lifeand then you sink as if you’d been looking Medusa in the third eye. And what are you, then, if not a lifeboat of a fish swimming through the nightsky of a bejewelled underworld resonant with soft laments?

I feel the effervescence of the Pleiades carbonating the waters of my life. A great blue heron flaps off like the headlines of yesterday’s newspaper, or the first draft of another poem inspired by the abyss, and I’m not unmindful of the sorrows of the world, and that this is recess, a sparkle in the eye of eternity, the exuberance of a boy on a dolphin in a great night sea of perilous awareness, not lightyears of blissshed by a firefly that came looking for me in the dark. I haven’t been rescued from anything. The depths and the surface are one for the moment, the highest and the lowest, the silly and sublime.

A dragon. A plumed serpent with a circumpolar outlooka peacock of a dinosaur flaunting its boas like a Fauvist painting of sex in the eyes of love and death. A ghost dance, of sorts, where my beginnings partner with my ends and together they make one bird, one candle in a cowled plumage of flamethat took a vow of poverty but has the flightfeathers of an heretical phoenix to spare just the same.

The nighthawk is riding its own thermals, the owl isn’t encumbered by its wisdom. I’m free inside. All the aviaries are empty and I’ve got an open door policy on my voice-box. The chimney’s mellifluous with bluebirds in the morning, and by nightfall even the most feeble sparks of insight are exalted by the constellations of the Eagle and the Swan.No companion but my solitude is pleased with itself. Everything I see and hear, down to the smallest pale-green frog chirping in the cattails, silvered in moonlight and water as the black snake tastes itlike a ripe strawberry on the warm, summer air, is ancestor, bloodline, wavelength woven into a flying carpet of picture-music I’m riding like the multiversal destiny of my membranous mindstreamand because I love starmaps and leaves, I’m riffing off the leit motifs of the stars, I’m writing poems in the glyphs of the scars like birthmarks on the bodies of good guitars.